The best books that explain why the West keeps getting the world wrong
This article was originally published by Shepherd, a book discovery website where authors and experts share their favourite books. BISA has a partnership with Shepherd to showcase our members' books and this time it's the turn of Oz Hassan. Look out for further articles by BISA members in the coming weeks. Try their bookshelf on international relations or politics to browse a wide range of recommended books.
Why am I passionate about this?
I became an academic because I believe knowledge should serve the world. I'm driven by a commitment to responsibility, realism, and social good, even when it's uncomfortable. This list reflects my frustration with how often Western governments act confidently but without the right philosophies, systems, and knowledge in place. They lack imagination, organisation, and the ability to deal with crises, which populist movements are now exploiting. I've spent years researching failed interventions because I believe we owe it to others to do better. These books helped me understand the world more clearly, but also reminded me of our limitations and how hard it is to grasp the contexts we shape.
I wrote...
Why the European Union Failed in Afghanistan
By Oz Hassan
What is my book about?
My book offers a gripping account of the most significant–yet least examined–foreign policy failure in the EU’s history. Drawing on exclusive interviews and two decades of research, it reveals how the EU’s well-intentioned attempts to rebuild Afghanistan unravelled into a story of confusion, contradiction, and collapse.
Why did the EU get it wrong? Rather than treating Afghanistan as a unique place with its own norms and history, EU officials approached it as a blank slate. This book explores how idealism, strategic naivety, and blind transatlantic loyalty led to wasted opportunities and devastating consequences. Looking at the formation of Afghanistan in world history, it situates the EU within broader questions of global order, foreign policy failure, and the limits of external action in the twenty-first century.
The books I picked & why
The Making of Global International Relations
Why did I love this book?
I loved this book because it finally explained something I’d felt for years but couldn’t quite articulate: that International Relations theory, as I was taught it, never really made sense of the world I knew. I remember reading it and thinking—yes, this is why so much of what passes for "global" thinking felt alien to my own experience of politics, power, and history. I’d always recognised that IR was speaking a language of empire without realising it.
What I value most is how the authors expose the discipline’s deep entanglement with Western historical assumptions—something I’d long mistrusted as universally applicable—but have never seen mapped so clearly. It helped me understand not just what IR is but also what it gets wrong about the world.
The Reality of Social Construction
Why did I love this book?
This book blew open a question I’d been circling for years: how do we know what’s real in the social world, and who decides?
I first read the philosopher John Searle (who the book starts with) as a student, and it lit a fire, but this book turned that spark into something much more powerful. It showed me that reality isn't just "out there," waiting to be described—it's built through language, norms, and belief, and yet that doesn't make it any less real.
I loved how this book made space for complexity without sliding into postmodern fog. It gave me sharper tools to think with and helped me see how our shared world gets made—and how it could be made differently. I've never thought the same way since. The book outlines what we get philosophically wrong about the world in a way that is useful.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Why did I love this book?
I’ve always known that IR theory is terrible at helping us predict anything. This book confirmed that instinct—and then gave me something better.
The book doesn't offer a grand theory of the world; it shows how careful, humble, context-driven thinking beats big ideas almost every time. I loved how it dismantled the myth of expert authority with one brutal line: "Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world…are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys."
It taught me to think in probabilities, to temper my overconfidence, and to focus on the details, not broad generality. In many ways, this has made me a worse “IR scholar”, but demonstrably much better at predicting events. This book is indispensable if you care about understanding policy outcomes, rather than just sounding clever. It sharpened the way I think about the future.
Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World
Why did I love this book?
This book helped me see how much damage is done when treating the world as simple.
Escobar never mentions complexity theory, but that's precisely what animates his critique—a sense that development thinking flattens difference, reduces context, and imposes order where none exists. I'd long been uneasy with how the West 'solves' problems it helped create. This book gave me the conceptual tools to see why: it exposed development as a discourse that makes the world legible in Western terms, only to intervene on that basis.
What I love about this book is its refusal to accept those terms. It shows how we get the world wrong by insisting it should resemble us in the West, and why the costs of that are always borne elsewhere.
Global Governance and Local Peace
Why did I love this book?
This book made me stop and think—not about theory but institutional machinery. It captures the strange truth that international organisations often fail not because they don't care but because they are built in ways that make failure inevitable.
I've spent years trying to understand why international interventions so often feel disconnected from the realities they're meant to address. This book didn't just confirm that suspicion—it opened up the system and showed me why they get things wrong. The book is about more than country offices; it is really about systems and their blind spots.
My copy still has whole paragraphs underlined, and every time I have read it, it gives me something new. It gave me a different vocabulary for thinking about dysfunction—not as an accident but as a product of design.
Photo by Courtney Laws on Unsplash
